As an Emmy Award-winning content expert and technical manager, Rob Hedrick has an extensive background in live sports and TV production. Hedrick serves as the production director of the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) and is responsible for managing its real-time video solutions for broadcast and digital OTT delivery. With a network and digital broadcast schedule of more than 50 events each year, Hedrick began to rely on Marshall Electronics' CV344 compact POV camera to help capture all of NHRA's exciting quarter-mile drag racing action.

NHRA was founded by Wally Parks in 1951. It is a drag racing organization responsible for formulating drag racing rules and organizing events throughout the United States and Canada. With more than 80,000 drivers, NHRA claims to be the world's largest motor sports sanctions agency. Popular NHRA events include its professional Camping World Racing Series and the non-professional athlete division of the Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series.

The NHRA team mainly uses Marshall CV344 to capture the start of the game and the light bulb indicator of the system. On the reverse side, CV344 can also take pictures of cars leaving the starting line. "Marshall CV344 provides incredible image quality," Hedrick said. "I have used them in the past and they are just great cameras. The auto iris function of the CV344 is great because we don't have to shade the camera every time there is a change. It's also great at night."

Hedrick and his team found that racing fans are very loyal to the sport regardless of the level of the car. "Motor racing fans like content and they like watching cars," Hedrick added. "In order to provide more content, we started to conduct more non-professional athlete competitions. These competitions are usually not covered in national competitions. The athletes are divided into seven departments and a large number of competitions are held nationwide. We proposed The idea of ​​a partition streaming kit, and a streaming flight kit is provided for each partition race group so that the content can be streamed to our OTT channel. Each of these kits will contain three CV344, and It will move from one event to another together with the department heads. This move will allow us to hold approximately 60 events throughout the association."

For applications that require convenient transportation, Hedrick found CV344 to be a perfect choice. According to Hedrick, the setup includes the following equipment. "The CV344 is mounted on the tripod of the Tilta V mounting plate, with a D-connector on it," Hedrick said. "I have an adapter that can plug the D tap into Marshall. Its output also has another power connector that can power the fiber optic transceiver. Therefore, both the camera and the fiber are turned off with an IDX DUO-C198 191Wh high-load battery. This gives us 22 hours of runtime. You don’t have to run any additional power for it, and you can have a thousand feet of fiber. The really good thing is that you put Marshall on a board with batteries, and the whole thing It can be packed in two or three Pelican boxes. This is really efficient."

The Marshall CV344 compact POV camera provides performance, flexibility and value in a compact form factor. CV344 is built around the next-generation 2.5 megapixel high-performance HD sensor, which can provide ultra-clear and clear progressive video up to 1920x1080p 60/59/50fps and interlaced 1920x1080i 60/59/50fps and 720p. The CV344 utilizes the full-size BNC (3GSDI) output on the rear panel and locked I/O connections for power, control, and stereo audio input (embedded in 3GSDI output). The CS lens mount of CV344 provides various fixed and zoom lens options from ultra-wide-angle to telephoto.

"CV344 is great," Hedrick added. "Its size, picture quality, cost and durability are great. This is a great camera, and I am really happy that it meets our needs. I really like how compact the whole thing is, and It can run on batteries without the fact that you don’t have to run a million-mile extension line. I think this is such a big advantage for us because our finish line is actually 1,320 feet from the starting line, and then to the booth There are 1,000 feet."